Kelly M. Duke Bryant, "Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940" (U Mass Press, 2026)
About this episode
The episode discusses Kelly M. Duke Bryant's book on childhood under French colonialism in Senegal, examining child protection policies and African children's responses from 1848 to 1940.
Kelly M. Duke Bryant’s Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940 ( U Mass Press, 2026)explores how colonial child protection policies and African children’s responses to them produced new ways of defining, measuring, documenting, and experiencing childhood in the French colony of Senegal from 1848 to 1940. In this groundbreaking book, Bryant takes the scholarship in new directions, offering to a literature dominated by studies of British colonies in the twentieth century a study of childhood in a French colony from the immediate post-emancipation period through the 1930s. This focus allows her to complicate the generally accepted timeline of child protection in colonial Africa and question other assumptions about children’s history on the continent. The author, Kelly M. Duke Bryant, is an Associate Professor of History at Rowan University and the current President of the French Colonial Historical Society. The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. She is the author of An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West…
People in this episode
Host: Elisa Prosperetti
Guest: Kelly M. Duke Bryant
Topics covered
- French colonialism
- childhood
- African history
- colonial policies
- Senegal
- child protection
- post-emancipation
Keywords
- colonialism
- childhood
- Senegal
- African children
- French colony
- child protection policies
- historical scholarship
- post-emancipation
- 20th century
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Rowan University, French Colonial Historical Society, U Mass Press
Books & works: Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa
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